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Two for the Road

Clockwise, from top left, Crater Lake National Park; the writer, her husband and their minivan; Yellowstone; onion country by the Oregon-Idaho border.Credit
Photographs for The New York Times by Leah Nash (Crater Lake and van) and Patrick Jude Wilson

THE stream, burbling and gleaming with newness, was racing down the mountain just below its birthplace at the Continental Divide. No animal foot or errant petrochemical or human hand had yet touched this glistening water, still chilled from the snow it had melted out of a few minutes before. We would be the first.

About two feet wide, it was easy to dip into, once we’d left our van by the road and clambered up through scratchy, interlacing brush. No one was in sight; there was no sound but the rushing water and the wind. “Drink some!” my husband, Pat, insisted. “Bend down and cup your hands.” And flouting all the conventional wisdom about never drinking from a stream, I did.

It was cold and sweet, primordially clean — exhilarating. But what would you expect from the freshest drink on the continent?

We were in Colorado, on Day 4 of a cross-country road trip. Just before, we had stopped at Loveland Pass, 12,000 feet up, where a sign marks the Divide and tourists gaze out over the Rockies and down at flagpole-straight pines. In a pocket meadow, optimistic teenagers were snowboarding on a shrunken July snow patch. Tourists explained to one another that rain falling back where we’d come from on Route 6 would drop toward the Mississippi River, while ahead of us it was destined for the Pacific Coast. As were we.

It’s a big, beautiful country and a familiar dream: set out across the United States in your own vehicle, on your own terms. Drive where you want to. Pull over when you want to. See a lot of what you’ve always heard about and plenty of what you haven’t. Just how common the dream I discovered when I began telling people about our plans. Over and over, people said, “I’ve always wanted to do that,” and then, wistfully, “But I never have the time.”

We didn’t have the time, either. Two weeks’ vacation in the heart of summer — that was it. Not a lot of leisure for driving six or seven thousand miles. But we did it anyway, and here’s what we learned: You can see a lot of this country in 14 days. And it’s every bit as much fun as you thought it would be.

What made it work for us was a used 2006 Toyota Sienna minivan, which we converted with minimal effort from soccer-mom special to RV Lite. It has privacy-protecting tinted glass and enough room — if you take out both rows of back seats — for two people to roll out foam pads and sleep, and store things besides. Yes, quarters were a little tight. True, not everyone would be thrilled with the portable toilet, space-saving and odor-neutralizing marvel though it was. And two people living together in a minivan had better be in love.

But the van, a camper masquerading as a family car, gave us flexibility. We had a commitment in California, a reunion at Stanford University that would occupy three of our precious days, but still we wanted leeway for spontaneity. With the van, we could stay in a campground, in an urban hotel and even in a Wal-Mart parking lot. (All of which we did.) We didn’t have to do a lot of complicated planning or keep to a tight schedule. Unlike the car campers we saw, we were always out of the rain and walled off from lurking grizzlies. Unlike the RV-ers, we weren’t burdened by a big, expensive rig. And on the long stretches, we were getting 30 miles per gallon. (Honest. We kept track.)

The Wal-Mart accommodations came the first night out, after a day of boring Interstate driving from our home east of Buffalo to western Illinois. Neither of us had camped in years, and we hadn’t thought to make sure someone would be on hand at our rural private campground (optimistically reserved, unrecommended, on the Internet) if we arrived late. The office was empty, the door locked, and with no one to assign us a campsite, we wandered aimlessly in the dark, passing tents occupied by cheerful families and shabby trailers that appeared permanently moored, before giving up. The nearby Wal-Mart parking lot was fine — and free. We slept well and awoke to birdsong and the slam of the store manager’s car door as she arrived at 6 a.m. for her day of work.

On a quiet Sunday morning, with the world not quite awake, the last 20 or 30 miles to the Mississippi were Edenic: lifting mists, lush vegetation, land so flat it seemed to merge almost seamlessly into the calm Rock River running alongside the highway. We crossed the Mississippi, and the van sped smoothly under a baking sun west to Des Moines, south to Kansas City and then southwest into the Flint Hills, where we’d come to see the prairie.

THE farmers who plowed up most of the American Midwest spared the Flint Hills, which in aerial photos look like immense green ocean swells, because the rock was too close to the surface for plows. The buffalo were replaced by cattle, but in an area roughly the size of Vermont, the tallgrass prairie survives, a remnant of what most of the midsection of North America once must have looked like.

Lucky for Kansas. Under an immense blue sky, we followed Route 56 through a huge platter of a landscape with gentle rises and shallow, scooped-out low spots, with small islands of dark-leafed trees. There was one minor disappointment: the grass wasn’t six feet tall. We learned the next day, on a tour at the 11,000-acre Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve south of the city of Council Grove, that we were at the wrong season: the longest stems shoot up in the fall. We were captivated anyway.

Just east of Council Grove, three Indians in traditional garb appeared to be riding on horseback on a ridge; they turned out to be metal sculptures, silhouettes intended as a welcome to town. And just north, we parked for the night and climbed into the back of the van on the shores of a reservoir called Council Grove Lake, on a perfectly graded site in a meticulously maintained campground with excellent plumbing — all of it run by the Army Corps of Engineers.

We were camping, but we weren’t cooking, and the next morning we had $7 omelets and homemade cinnamon bread at the Saddlerock Café, a tiny, humble-looking place on a back street in Council Grove. “You’ve come a long way to eat at the Saddlerock,” a big, friendly man in jeans and a Western hat greeted us, eyeing our New York license plates, as he left his pickup and we left our van in the restaurant’s postage-stamp parking lot. Smiling, he added, “All the cowboys eat here.”

He turned out to be the genuine article himself, a 50ish veteran of riding and roping named Don Day. As we headed for a side table, he sat down front and center under a small overhead sign reading “Bull Session Table” and, while coffee-drinking men came and went, joined an easygoing conversation about golf, camera technology and Air Force One, which was on the newscasts that morning. Politics didn’t seem to be on the agenda, although when we were drawn into the talk for a while, one man, who said he was part Indian, made clear he had no use for Gen. George Armstrong Custer.

Council Grove, where Custer owned land and the downtown is a National Historic Landmark, was an early entry on a long list of places we wished we had more time to explore — the Next Time list. But for now, we’d had a good sample. We pushed on across the flat land of western Kansas and eastern Colorado to a campground high in the Rockies, where we sat on our foam beds in the back of a van and raided the cooler for a midnight snack of fruit and peanut butter sandwiches.

Advance research paid off the next day. We had to dash across Colorado, but we’d learned from a relative about two quick, spectacular detours off Interstate 70 onto the older, roughly parallel Route 6. The second was Loveland Pass, where we sampled the snowmelt. The first was a magical stretch starting near Golden, through the canyon where Clear Creek rushes between cliffs in old gold-mining country. The truckers and commuters speeding by appeared not to notice the scenery, but when we took the Lariat Loop road up Lookout Mountain, we found worshipers perched on rocks at one particularly expansive valley viewpoint, singing “Amazing Grace.”

The tempting hot springs in Glenwood Springs, off I-70 farther west, had to be added to the Next Time list, but we had a pleasant if indifferently prepared outdoor garden lunch at the Hotel Colorado. It’s worth the stop just to gawk at the huge, ornate lobby that Teddy Roosevelt, Al Capone and the Unsinkable Molly Brown wandered through in their glory days.

Beyond that was the dry country, hour after parched hour all the way to the Sierra Nevada. Covered wagons came to mind. How did the pioneers take it, even with the Colorado River and its tributaries snaking around to remind them occasionally that yes, there was something called water? Plodding past huge eroded cliffs and hills of long-dried lava, did they find themselves thinking in weird images: battlements and palisades, giants’ hockey rinks, melted elephants?

We arrived after 6 p.m. at the John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River, Utah, and were firmly told that although the Web site and brochure had both said closing was at 8 p.m., in fact it was at 7. A bit miffed, we raced around the exhibits but had to admit that our hardships didn’t match the bone-crunching terror of Powell’s 1869 expedition, which careened for months over unexplored rapids.

The Mormon sites in Salt Lake City also had to be filed under Next Time, but outside of town the next day, just after Interstate 80 had taken us along the shore of the Great Salt Lake, we happened upon a contender for the nation’s most interesting highway rest stop, at the Bonneville Salt Flats. In addition to the standard picnic tables and rest rooms, it had a view of the flats, with peaks looming behind them, and a foot wash — a concrete structure with a seat and a water hose — for cleansing sneakers after venturing out onto the salt, which felt oddly damp and sticky. Wayfarers ran out to leave footprints, studied a sign about speed records and watched a lone adventurer make limited headway in a kart equipped with a sail.

Thoughts of the pioneers intruded again in Truckee, Calif., where we camped in Donner Memorial State Park. Minus the 20 feet or so of snow that trapped the Donner Party there in 1846, leading to their notorious cannibalism, the Donner Pass is a beautiful place, crisp and clear with majestic trees and peaks.

We’d made it to California, and unlike most of the Donners, we made it to the Pacific Coast, squeezing in a few hours — after our reunion — at Wilder Ranch State Park near Santa Cruz, where a promontory juts out into the ocean and seabirds nest in cliffs. A little West Coast shopping seemed necessary, too; we found it in Corralitos, at a market selling dozens of kinds of homemade sausage and what seemed at least as many varieties of mustard, and in San Gregorio at a laid-back general store, in business since 1889, where you can buy a broom or a dishtowel, have a drink at the bar and hear some live music, too.

It wasn’t the most unusual shopping opportunity of our trip. That came a couple of days later, east of Bend, Ore., when we spotted a handmade sign beside Route 20 advertising “Beetle-Cleaned Skulls.” The driveway led to the home of Mark Thill, a fit, 40ish taxidermist and part-time deck builder who was happy to enlighten us. The skulls belong to native animals and sometimes African game shot by his customers, who bring him the heads and pay for the services of his million or so industrious beetles, specialists in stripping carrion. The technique is, he assured us, distinctly superior to boiling, practiced by some of his competitors.

The gallery in his house explained the appeal. Cleaned and bleached, the skulls become decorative artwork, stark and beautiful, especially when long, curving horns remain attached. So this is what Georgia O’Keeffe was getting at.

We didn’t buy, but Mr. Thill, who came to this work after crab fishing for 17 years in the Bering Sea, seemed happy just to tell us about it. In an outbuilding, he showed us the beetles at work, African dermestids, also sometimes used for cleaning museum specimens. “They’re pretty hard to get,” Mr. Thill said, and he bought the starter beetles for his colony after carefully cultivating another owner. “It took me about 10 trips to Montana and 20 cases of beer.”

By this time we were well into Week 2 and heading back toward home. Rather than driving directly east from San Francisco, we’d gone north on Interstate 5 past the majestic, snow-covered volcano called Mount Shasta and on up into Oregon, on a route chosen to take in some of the best-known national parks. Traveling at midsummer, we feared roads choked with motor coaches. But perhaps because we were at the parks on weekdays, hordes did not materialize. At the campsites, we had neighbors, but nothing felt overcrowded. As for the parks, they lived up to their billing.

At Crater Lake National Park in Oregon on a Monday and Tuesday, our van was the only vehicle parked at some of the overlooks on the rim road, and we felt almost alone looking down at this gem of a lake, a bottomless pool in an old volcanic caldera, colored the bluest blue in nature’s paintbox. Boats are mostly banned, and no buildings line the shore; the quiet reinforced a sense of a remote paradise.

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Eastern Oregon blended into western Idaho in a long carpet of sagebrush, interrupted by irrigated fields and the rich agricultural area around Boise — and before that, the sweet little town of Vale, Ore., whose picture-book main street rises in the shadow of a mountainside. (Next time.)

On our way to Craters of the Moon National Monument, our GPS unit failed us, sending us to a road closed for construction. We were rescued in Richfield, Idaho, by the smiling, silver-haired Betty Piper at Pipers store, which has operated in town since 1939. So many travelers had been asking directions that Mrs. Piper had Google maps printed and ready to give out. She also explained the road closing: crews were reworking a bad curve when blasting exposed a big hole that had to be filled: a lava cave. “Our desert is probably full of them,” she said.

The lava is aboveground at Craters of the Moon, a vast, hauntingly lovely landscape of lava fields and cinder cones, with hardy evergreens growing up out of the rubble like nursery specimens surrounded by black mulch. The loop drive was scenic and uncrowded; the climb up one of the cinder cones pleasantly arduous and rewarded by a sweeping view. The place was also a geological introduction to Yellowstone National Park, about 100 miles to the northeast.

The hot spot under Yellowstone, which creates the drama of its geysers and scalding springs, used to be under Idaho. The earth’s crust has been on the move over that hot spot for millions of years, and from time to time, the molten material breaks through the surface. Its legacy marches from west to east across Idaho in the form of a series of oldest-to-newest buttes from past eruptions and finally, the lava and cinder wilderness at Craters of the Moon, where the last outburst was as recent as 2,000 years ago. Soon it will be Yellowstone’s turn. And though “soon” in this context means roughly within the next thousand years, it was still a sobering thought the next day at Norris Geyser Basin in northwestern Yellowstone, where a wooden walkway winds and climbs amid hellish-looking steam, vaporous pools and a treacherous boggy crust, all of it mesmerizing.

Time caught up with us in the Black Hills, where a flat tire in Deadwood, S.D., ate up the hours we’d hoped to spend at Badlands National Park. Now just a weekend remained before the first day back at work in New York City. Speeding east across the wide fields of South Dakota and Minnesota, we scanned maps and found a consolation prize, one final manageable stop for the morning of our last, marathon day of driving.

The International Crane Foundation, hidden away on a quiet road in Baraboo, Wis., held us longer than we’d planned, but it was worth it. Cranes are endangered, and the foundation, in operation since 1973 to breed and preserve them, has representatives of all 15 crane species in the world. Most were on view, stalking around in all their gawky grace in long, grassy outdoor pens. The Asian and African cranes were curious to look at — and looked curiously back at us, an eye-to-eye experience in the case of one six-foot variety from India. But this trip was about America, and we lingered to watch the sandhills — the species that draws thousands of people to Nebraska every year during their spring migration — and, especially, the whooping cranes.

Most Americans know the story of the whoopers, hunted and hounded down to just 16 birds in the 1940s and then brought back from the very brink of extinction, with conservationists’ help, to a current, precarious population of a few hundred.

The pair that eventually poked their heads out of the grass in Baraboo projected a fitting dignity. Tall, white-feathered and majestic, they gazed out, scarcely moving, as the grasses riffled gently around them — ghost birds somehow hanging on to life.

Just another wonder in this wondrous land.

IF YOU GO, AND GO, AND GO

WHERE TO STAY

The federal government Web site www.recreation.gov brings together information on campgrounds run by several federal agencies. Reservations for some sites can be made with information from the site or by phone (877-444-6777); other campsites are held back to be doled out first-come first-served as campers arrive. One of many federally run choices is Canning Creek Campground (945 Lake Road, Council Grove, Kan.; 620-767-6745), run by the Army Corps of Engineers. A site suitable for either tent camping or a recreational vehicle, purchased in advance and prepaid online, was $17 in mid-July.

For national parks, search each park individually atwww.nps.gov, since many campgrounds are managed by private companies under contract with the government. At Crater Lake National Park, the comfortable sites at Mazama Village (Route 62, Crater Lake National Park; 888-774-2728) are managed by Xanterra Parks & Resorts (www.xanterra.com). A tent site in mid-July was $22.89.

State parks also run thousands of campgrounds, with varying rules and prices. A site at Donner Memorial State Park in California (12593 Donner Pass Road, Truckee, Calif.; 530-582-7894; www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=503; reservations, 800-444-7275 or www.reserveamerica.com) was $19. One at Henry’s Lake State Park in Idaho, 15 miles from the western entrance to Yellowstone National Park, was $27.56 (3917 East 5100 North, Island Park, Idaho; 208-558-7532; www.parksandrecreation.idaho.gov/parks/henryslake.aspx; reservations, 888-922-6743).

Several companies publish directories of private campgrounds, which run from basic to luxurious, with an accompanying variety in prices. A tent site amid tall evergreens at the Chief Hosa Lodge and Campground (27661 Genesee Drive, Golden, Colo.; 303-526-1324; www.chiefhosa.org) was $22.

Many, but not all, Wal-Mart stores allow recreational vehicles to stay overnight in their parking lots without charge. Travelers should call ahead to the specific store or arrive during its open hours to ask for permission.